I’ll be honest with you. I was not out here tearing the club up in 2001, at the tender age of 14. I was too busy trying to finally master the whole sine-cosine-tangent situation in Mr. So-and-So’s class and thus heroically salvage my GPA! And anyway I’m simply not built for the kinds of venues — strip clubs, BMF fronts, and other interior Hitman levels — that rappers were typically hooting and hollering about on hood classics of the mid-2000s. I’m an INTJ. The best I can do is karaoke. Say what you will about Alessia Cara, but that song about her stinking up ladies’ night with her childish misanthropy really speaks to me.
I did however grow up listening to Three 6 Mafia. This was the theme music of my older cousins and also the guys who sold CD-R bootlegs in the locker room. You know? When the Smoke Clears was a sort of social fabric, for a time, in Richmond, though of course the music came from Memphis. This social fabric extended well into the suburbs, deep into the country. I heard Three 6 Mafia everywhere and, with time, internalized the sounds and tropes of this very dark and strange collection of (to my mind, at the time) disembodied voices, who may as well have been ghosts.
“Illicit” doesn’t even begin to describe this music. Three 6 Mafia was Eazy-E taken to some surreal psychotropic extreme. Three 6 Mafia was witchcraft. Three 6 Mafia was Maury. I knew dudes who lived like this, but I wanted nothing to do with them; in fact my hustling to save my GPA was largely informed by my desperation to get out of the sticks; and yet, I couldn’t resist the hypnotic effect of these beats, these chants, these anthems. The music was so strange to me and really seemed to pervert the senses and expectations that I’d typically bring to bear on rap music, as if you could only really hear this shit under a blacklight. It wasn’t triumphalist. It didn’t really glamorize, sanitize, or rationalize anything; and it didn’t redeem anyone. The boys of Three 6 Mafia, plus Project Pat, were cartoonishly sleazy but still quite credibly menacing. And Gangsta Boo — oh, Gangsta Boo — she’d crush your nuts with her shoes!
Gangsta Boo raps in this very unsparing way, typically on the topic of ain’t-shit men and the resourceful women who frankly don’t love them but could still use them. She had one of those cold rat-tat-tat flows with a lot of stopping power, though she could also turn on a dime and overload her cadence with a few extra syllables, as a little fuck-you to symmetry and convention. OK: a lot of fuck-you. So many female rappers of a certain stature are these sassy, argumentative personas, but most of them are trying to be slick and somewhat deviously flirtatious or maybe even sincerely romantic; Gangsta Boo was just awesomely blunt. She was swinging a folding chair, effectively, and fearlessly pressing her long nails into your chest.
This was all rather paradoxically charming, though perhaps this is just me speaking for myself and my teen psyche. Gangsta Boo often came across as spiteful but not quite resentful; her verses were usually these long and unanswerable strings of maximally emasulating putdowns meant, in fact, to pump you up. At peak performance, honestly, I’d put her on par with Mixtape Weezy, in terms of her ability to make rap sound like it was her plaything, hers, and no one else’s. Of course Gangsta Boo had a much more humble trajectory as a solo artist spun off from a massively influential Southern Y2K hip-hop concern. This leads a lot of fans to call her underrated but I prefer to think of Gangsta Boo as a rapper who lived — and thrived — in her own pocket dimension, unburdened (or at least a little less so) by the hot-cold, damned-if crowd micromanagement of female rappers and their legacies.
Gangsta Boo died early this year, aged 43. I buried the lede here because it was really quite hard for me to imagine writing this post the other way around: starting with such a sad observation and then going on to savor her explosive pronunciation of various epithets. The cause of her death is so far uncertain, but it appears likely that she suffered a drug overdose after attending a concert on New Year’s Eve in Memphis. She was the youngest of the six original members of Three 6 Mafia and the third to die, after Lord Infamous and Koopsta Knicca. She always seemed surprised by world-conquering success story of hip-hop and her own longevity and influence within it, even as an underrated figure who only really got her due respect in Memphis. That social fabric has spread further than either of us could’ve imagined, screwing our faces under that blacklight, her in the club with properly deafening loudspeakers, me in the back of trig class with a county-issued Macbook, at the turn of the century. After all these years, I still can’t tell you what to do with all them goddamn imaginary numbers.